N.J. County Providing Laptops to Inmates for Legal Research
This is progress. I hope it catches on.
The [Bergen County] Sheriff's Department is not giving inmates fully loaded iMacs along with their jumpsuits as they come through the locking doors. They won't be working on their profiles on MySpace or bidding for rock hammers on eBay.
Rather, the department is offering stripped-down, durable mini-PCs, essentially limited to legal research, that inmates can have delivered to their cells for allotted periods. The department purchased the 80 laptops using $100,000 of its income from inmates' commissary purchases.
In other words, these computers have no internet access. The policy should be extended to federal inmates in pre-trial detention, many of whose cases are complex, involving discovery so voluminious it's only available on dvd or cd-rom.
It's important to remember that pre-trial detainees, who are often housed in county jails due to lack of available space in federal detention centers, or because there is no federal detention center in their neck of the woods, have not been convicted of any crime. They are simply being warehoused awaiting trial.
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